The way that the Vietnam War is now remembered as the helicopter war, the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan may be remembered for the use of unmanned drones or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Drones may facilitate remote intelligence gathering, alleviating the need for foot soldiers to enter into hostile areas “blind,” with little or no information about the location and strength of hostile forces. Drones may provide close combat support, such as identifying and eliminating targets of interest, alleviating the need to expose soldiers and/or airmen to potential small arms fire, mortars, rocket grenades, road-side bombs, anti-aircraft weaponry, missiles, and other dangers.
Identification of targets and reconnaissance typically involves analyzing video images acquired from cameras carried by the drones. Such cameras may maintain a real time video feed that tracks targets as they move or change over a long period of time. Since video involves sending multiple still frame images from a camera each second, streaming video requires a great deal of bandwidth. Maintaining such a large bandwidth is a challenge both for aircraft video systems that must process and stream the raw video data and ground stations that have limited bandwidth to receive the video feed. One of the tradeoffs to address these concerns is that video quality is degraded by either lowering the resolution (e.g. number of pixels) and/or reducing the image frame rate in order to decrease the required bandwidth. Thus, a video feed allows a remote operator to follow a target, but it does not provide a high resolution image of the target for detailed analysis.
Thus, there is a need for better image transmission from unmanned aerial vehicles.